OS News Archive

"ScaraOS is a 32bit mutiboot OS kernel for IA32 (PC/AT) systems. I wrote it to teach myself OS fundamentals and just to have a bit of fun. It already has PCI support, the beginnings of a paged memory management system, and the start of a VFS layer. It supports the basic PC/AT stuff such as timer, PIC, keyboard, floppy."

Codezero microkernel developers announced support for the quad core Cortex-A9 processors in their recently released v0.3 kernel. Codezero is an open source L4 microkernel variant written in C that evolves the L4 API for security and virtualization purposes. With the recent announcement Codezero team is probing the possibility of having their microkernel as an open source option for enabling virtual rooms of execution on high-end, multi-core mobile platforms. Cortex-A9 is the latest flagship product of ARM plc UK. With its unbeatable performance to power ratio, it is known as the biggest rival of Intel Atom line of cpus on the mobile cpu arena.

Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.

Version 0.4.2 of the little-known microkernel-based multiserver operating system HelenOS has been released. See their official release notes to find out what other bleeding-edge features besides an experimental and highly modular networking stack this release brings.

Contiki is an open source, low-power operating system for networked embedded systems. It includes the worlds smallest IPv6 stack and provides full IP networking in a few kilobytes of RAM, as well as low-power mechanism that makes a tiny radio-equipped microcontroller run for years on a pair of batteries. Version 2.4 has been released today.

We fought you off for as long as possible, but in the end we had to give in :) What decided it was that OSnews is not a mainstream source of news like Engadget or even sites where they actually employ people, we are not an entity like AOL that fails to grasp the reality of the web today and the issues surrounding the technology landscape. We have the technical background, and the community to boot to know that when we criticise others, we had better be doing the right thing ourselves. Get the feed here.

This is part three of Ars' guide about virtualisation. "Part 1 described three ways in which a component might be virtualized; emulation, "classic" virtualization, and paravirtualization, and part 2 described in more detail how each of these methods was used in CPU virtualization. But the CPU is not the only part of a computer that can use these techniques; although hardware devices are quite different from a CPU, similar approaches are equally useful."

Developed by industrial designer Barton Smith, the Stream Adaptive Computer System is an interesting take on making computing easier and more adaptable to suit the user's current needs. Today, he also unveiled the operating system and user interface that would run on Stream. It's... Amazing.

"Atomthreads is a free, lightweight, portable, real-time scheduler for embedded systems. It is released under the flexible, open source BSD license and is free to use for commercial or educational purposes without restriction. It is targeted at systems that need only a scheduler and the usual RTOS primitives. No file system, IP stack or device drivers are included, but developers can bolt on their own as required. Atomthreads will always be a small number of C files which are easy to port to any platforms that require threading by adding a simple architecture-specific file."

Taking a break from reporting on the latest netbook or phone rumours, Engadget posted an article yesterday about several elements in desktop operating systems writer Paul Miller finds outdated. While there's some interesting stuff in there, there's also a lot to discuss.

At the end of the year, mainly to shamelessly fill slow news around the holidays, OSNews usually asks the readers to share with all the other readers something about their computer setup. Since OSNews can be quite diverse when it comes to computing environments, these threads can often be quite interesting. This year, please chime in with the setup you use to read OSNews - computer, OS, software and maybe even provide screenshots or photos of your proud workspace. Has it changed a lot this year? Maybe switched browser, maybe switched OS even? Let everybody know!

The time of Christmas is obviously upon us. Programmers and bloggers all over the world are putting down their text editors, meaning there's no news for us to report on (unless you want to talk about yet another set of rumours about the Apple tablet). Still, I couldn't let this day go by without a story.

OpenVMS Software Roadmap December 2009
Significant changes:

• OpenVMS V8.4 will be followed by a patch to support the next generation HP Integrity systems after they are available
• OpenVMS V8.4 to be supported on HP VM V4.2
• Storage Futures shows D2D, VLS De-Duplication, SVSP
• TCP/IP V5.7 (due in 2010) will not include IPSEC (it's not ready) but IPSEC will appear later (it's in the E8.4 Field test kit if you want to try it)
• CIFS V1.2 due in 2010
• Insight DynamicsVSE Suite of Products-Integrated solution to manage, analyze and optimize physical, virtual resources on Integrity & Blades - 2010
• Availability Manager v3.1-1 on OpenVMS (Alpha and Integrity) - 2010
• RTR 5.2 is available.
• Future releases planned for the compilers
• The OpenVMS Service Support Roadmap shows the versions on long term support (Alpha V6.2, V7.3-2 etc) supported at least through 2012

I just stumbled upon an interesting forum thread over at AmigaWorld.net. The thread details whether or not AmigaOS and MorphOS should be called "hobby operating systems", and what kind of criteria should be applied. This sounded like an interesting point of discussion for OSNews.